Hidden Brains Insights

As we move into a New Year, the online space is flooded with Trend Reports on various domains like mobile web development trends, web development trends, wearable development trends, etc. While all are significant in their own space one trend report Data Center Managers will be tracking is the Data Storage Trends. Knowing storage trends is important as that will influence corporate strategy and procuring for storage in 2016.

Presenting the top 10 trends for Data Storage that might influence your business in 2016:

#1. Flash workstations with centrally stored data
The year 2016 is set to have more of desktop and laptop computers come equipped with flash storage in place of hard drives-with data stored centrally in the cloud or in the data center.

#2. Tiered storage automation
Studies indicate that an increasing number of enterprise data centers will adopt greater levels of automation in tiered storage methodologies in 2016. Not only can these help automatically write and retrieve frequently accessed data to rapid media like flash/solid state disks, it will write and store seldom accessed data to cheap and much slower hard drives and tape drives.

#3. Storage convergence on the hybrid cloud
It’s been more than a decade since cloud technology is being used. However, businesses are still found to be facing difficulty executing hybrid data storage that can incorporate public cloud data, private cloud data, and data center data.

With the hybrid cloud market growing at an annual compound rate of 29.22% over the period of 2014 to 2019, 2016 is expected to witness IT and storage vendors continue to make progress in generating methodologies. These are expected to enable companies move data between various types of cloud and data center repositories easily.

#4. Data as an asset on the corporate balance sheet
Industry analysts and regulators are already carrying out active discussions regarding whether data should be made an asset on corporate balance sheets. Well, if this happens, internal insights about the significance of storage will increase - encouraging more corporate investment into higher end forms of storage and automated storage management systems.

#5. Falling flash prices
The pre-2016 months began with indications that the value/price of flash/solid state storage had fallen as much as 75 percent, resulting in trend that has opened the wallets of data centers to insert more flash and solid state memory into their storage systems.

#6. Hard Drive - Reinvented!
Hard drives as always will also rule in 2016 as they have a remarkably long tenure in enterprise data centers. Here you have Intel delivering new hard drive technology in 2016 with its Optane drives. It uses a 3D Xpoint chip that can hold data even when the hard drive is powered down. Moreover, it uses a new way to store digital data that can operate as much as 1,000 times as fast as the flash memory technology inside hard drives, memory sticks, and mobile devices in the present time today.

#7. Cold storage/archiving
Worried about preserving data that are seldom accessed? Cold storage provides an economical means of safekeeping your less-used data, as data here is stored on cheap, slow-moving disks that helps lower data center storage media expenses. Moreover, it will also be about data archiving and cold storage that can keep stride with the ongoing salvo of structured and unstructured data. As such, enterprises requirement to store this is a relatively routine process-but all-in-all a necessary one too.

#8. End-to-end storage management
One of the major issues with tiered, automated storage management in the past has been that every storage vendor has its own exclusive technology and gear. So, from the storage manager's viewpoint, it calls for a collective picture of how all of the enterprise's storage is working together.

Even though, it is not expected that a totally integrated and holistic storage management reality will be reached in 2016; vendors will continue to work toward open API standards and a "plug-in" concept that will someday allow a more complete view of all storage assets together with their performance data.

#9. New chips for enhanced solid state disk performanceFPGA chips (field programmable gate arrays) processing enables an organization to process large chunks of data faster, thereby cutting the mean time to decision from data analytics performed on the data. This turbo-charges solid state drive performance and enables even more rapid processing of high demand data.

10: The future of tape
Analysts have been signaling the end of tape as a storage medium for years, as more companies will be storing video files, especially like video surveillance files for office & building security. Now, maintaining logs of these video files over time is still the best fit for tape.